PUREi Produces 5000 Educational Literature Videos for Course Hero

September 22, 2020

Course Hero is an online learning platform for course-specific study resources. Course Hero supports students on their unique learning journey as they seek help and resources to better understand their coursework, prepare for exams, learn and remember.

In 2016, Course Hero partnered with PUREi to create a pilot video series to bring the classic literary work, The Odyssey, to life through a series of animated educational videos. They wanted to create their own original literature based video content and learning resources that far outshined their competitors.  

One of the first things PUREi did was create a 3 part focus group study to determine what the marketplace would want in both content, creative direction and production style. The outcome of this focus group study would set the direction for the production of this first pilot series.

After the initial phase of the study, a single pilot video was created. PUREi wrote scripts for each of the books/chapters of The Odyssey as well as non-chapter topics such as characters, themes, symbols, plot summary, author bio and summary & analysis. Our designers developed a unique creative direction and put together a set of design & production guidelines. We then auditioned literature experts to find the best person to bring the story to life in our in-house green screen studio. Our staff of producers, writers, designers, motion graphic designers, video editors and content editors produced the pilot video series. 

Back these went to our last phase of the focus group study, testing our pilot against all the major competitors out there. Low and behold, our concept won over students in a huge way, scoring incredibly high for learning capacity, information & content, style and likability among many other factors. The concept was proven, and the project was green lighted to produce what would amount to thousands of videos on hundreds of the top literature titles over the next four years.

PUREi met the challenge of producing this many videos while maintaining consistency on all levels of production and post production as well as content accuracy by developing a tightly defined and manageable workflow. We scaled up operations by creating a dedicated team of twenty people including our full-time literature expert on-screen talent, video producers, writers, designers, motion graphic artists, video editors and content editors. We also refined our processes and project management methodology utilizing gantt charts and spreadsheets to manage and track every aspect of the production of every single video. Course Hero provided us a list of literary titles to produce and PUREi handled everything else. 

The partnership was going so well, that Course Hero expanded their request even further by asking PUREi to create videos for other subject matter including topics such as Principles of Accounting, Intro to Biology and American Government, just to name a few. We worked with subject matter experts to present the information along side animated content helping students understand each topic in a clear and concise way. 

Over the course of four years, PUREi produced 5,000 videos for Course Hero. All of these videos are currently available to anyone that wants to view them on YouTube. The videos have been wildly popular with hundreds of titles having over 100,000 views as of the date of this writing, and the numbers just continue to grow year after year. The Summary & Analysis video for Animal Farm has almost 600,000 views alone. You can see that video as well as all the other videos PUREi produced on the Course Hero YouTube channel at: www.youtube.com/coursehero.